Cheffrey
The voice of your recipe
Team
Filip Czekajlo
Supervisors
Dipl. Des. Christian Wendrock-Prechtl
Project
University course (Voice Based Apps)
Timeframe
2018 – 2019
Cheffrey is a voice assistant for the kitchen. Choose a recipe, and Cheffrey will assist you and answer every question you may have about that recipe. The screen will show all the information you need to perform the step-by-step instructions of the recipe. All you have to do, is cook!
In a university course centred around voice user interfaces, me and my team partner decided to take on a growing problem with cooking recipes: how can I look at the recipe on my phone when I have sticky fingers?
Research & derivation
Our approach to this problem focused on interactivity. While conducting our own research, we found out that almost all participants used their phone in the kitchen and that the process of preparing a recipe is not as simple as just following instructions.
Shadowing of participants cooking from a recipe
The key takeaway was that to make a VUI recipe work we would need to make recipe steps as simple as possible, so that the attention remains on the various cooking acts as opposed to on the phone. Additionally we wanted to enable users to adapt to their circumstances, ask questions, go back a step and maintain oversight over where they are in the process.
Design
In our designs, we tried to create segways at all steps of the recipe, while keeping the actual information on screen to a minimum. Through testing figured out the right combination of a key image of the current step and a short phrase made up of the ingredients being used and a verb signifying what to do with them. We found that the voice assistant needed to be complemented by visual elements because most recipes rely heavily on pictures to explain procedure.
Shadowing of participants cooking from a recipe
We presented our findings in front of peers as well as industry professionals and got positive feedback from both. In this project, having done a lot research as well as design, I learned how research can propel design decisions. The resulting designs seemed simple and that is a mark of good research.